10 Murals From Nuart 2014

Nuart is a month long international street art festival which takes place each year in the coastal town of Stavanger, in the west of Norway. The mural festival, established in 2001, was one of the first of its kind, and it had turned its focus exclusively to street art in 2005. In addition to several side projects, and a vast production of public artworks which are created across Stavanger by a select group of street artists invited from all sides of the world each year, Nuart stages one of the globally most anticipated street art exhibitions of the year, which take place at Tou Scene indoor gallery. Here, Widewalls presents a list of ten murals created for the 2014 edition of Nuart festival, ranging from traditional graffiti to more conceptual installations.

Fra.Biancoshock - Humorous and Thought-Provoking

Italian street artist Fra.Biancoshock is known for his expressive process he calls Ephemeralism which draws inspiration both from typical street art and conceptual and performance art. Fra.Biancoshock creates artworks that have a short existence in space, but through photography and video, exist limitlessly in time. For the 2014 Nuart festival, Fra.Biancoshock painted a wall with a mural that resembles a Nazi flag of Third Reich Germany. In the center of the red wall he painted a white disk with a black “swastika” made out of four letters “f” which appear like the one that constitutes the Facebook logo. In front of the wall he placed a classic white chair, making this installation humorous and thought-provoking at the same time.

Photo by Steven P. Harrington.

SpY - A Well Thought Out Error

Spanish street artist SpY, a modern day surrealist, has been creating art filled with humor and irony since the mid-eighties. Deeply connected with the urban elements it incorporates, through careful observation of the site and attention to its endless objects and materials available, each SpY’s installation is well thought out before execution. Through context, or its absence, witty urban art of SpY is challenging and always suggesting new perspectives to viewers’ perceptions of their surroundings. SpY’s installation for this Nuart was a mural reading “error” painted on two sides of the disused building previously housing laser clinic.

Martin Whatson - One of the Local Participants

One of the local street artists creating for the 2014 Nuart was Martin Whatson. Whatson is a Norwegian stencil artist with a never-ending urge to find beauty in what is often disregarded as ugly, outdated and left behind. His early, more political style, has over the years developed into very subtle art that combines graffiti, stencil art and decaying walls. Whatson’s 2014 Nuart mural is a good example of his artistic expression. Painted on the gray wall of the house at the bottom of the Stavanger street, it shows stenciled, monochromatic young man pulling down the grey sheet of color, uncovering vibrantly colored graffiti that were painted over.

Levalet - Humorous and Intelligent Street Art

Charles Leval, better known as Levalet, is a French street artist recognized for his humorous and intelligent black and white paste-ups of people which can be found on walls, concrete recesses and sidewalks all around Paris. These mesmerizing installations, that show Levalet’s strong sense of the absurd, cleverly interact with their environments and incorporate real objects, like umbrellas and books, amusing viewers as they very often function like optical illusions. Such is the installation Levalet executed at TOU Scene of the 2014 Nuart festival. Painted on the decaying wall in an abandoned building, it combines Levalet’s intricately painted paste-ups with broken water pipes and power cords found at the site.

Photo by Steven P. Harrington.

MaisMenos - Seemingly Simple and Witty, but Effective Art with a Powerful Message

Miguel Januário is an acclaimed Portuguese street artist whose conceptual intervention art project called ±MaisMenos± (plus/minus) offers a critical and thought provoking commentary of life in modern urban societies and its political, economic and social managing organizations. Januário’s interventions are seemingly simple and based on text, but they deliver powerful messages that engage audience to contemplate on issues of the social implications and consequences, both positive and negative, of the contemporary urban societies governed by bureaucracies. Nuart festival featured several witty, cutting-edge works of Miguel Januário, which could be found on different locations across the town of Stavanger, and which, most certainly, drew a lot of attention.

Icy & Sot - Large Scale 3D Social Message

Icy & Sot is a highly prolific New York City based Iranian street art duo of brothers, which generated an international buzz and worldwide recognition for their striking stencil images of war, peace, hope and despair. After the streets of Iran, Paris, Sao Paulo, San Francisco and New York, for last year’s edition of Nuart festival Icy & Sot left their amazing stencil art piece in the streets of Stavanger. The street art duo created a large scale three-dimensional, monochrome mural made of wooden cut out stencils of marginalized characters and homeless people, which are rising above the roof of the building.

Photos by Juliiea for StreetArtNews.

Strøk - Stunningly Photorealistic Imagery

Anders Gjennestad, who goes under the artistic name of Strøk, is a Norweigan street artist, and a true master of stencil art. His artistic process starts with his own photographs which he then transforms into hand-cut, highly intricate, multi-layered stencils of stunning photorealistic imagery with great depth. The result is a profoundly complex, tactile and thought-provoking artwork which interacts with its surroundings, and appears like it is three-dimensional. For the 2014 Nuart street art festival, Strøk created this captivating and mind-boggling mural, a snapshot of amazingly detailed, stenciled people, who appear to be running around and playing on the large wall of the building, casting their long shadows across it.

Photos by Juliiea for StreetArtNews

Tilt - Panic Room

Tilt is a renowned French graffiti artist, internationally recognized for his traditional, yet unique style of vibrantly colored “throw-up” bubble letters, which very often create a greater picture of high impact shapes. For the 2014 edition of the Nuart Street Art Festival, Tilt has produced two astonishing pieces. The first one is the mural of a hand grenade painted in colors of the American flag and made out of bubble letters. The other one is his “Panic Room” installation painted at TOU Scene. It is a graffiti intervention executed on the part of the public male toilet which has turned one of its halves into a poetic wall of classic Tilt graffiti style.

Photos by Juliiea for StreetArtNews and Henrik Haven.

M-City - Epic Ship

M-City, also known as Mariusz Waras, is a Polish multimedia street artist and collector of Polish street art, who has gained worldwide recognition for his several hundreds of stencil murals painted all across the world, including cities like Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, Budapest, Sao Paulo, London and Prague. For the Nuart Street Art Festival, M-City created an art piece that is probably the most ambitious one featured on this festival. It is an epic, 150 meters long supply ship he meticulously painted over using hundreds of stencils, creating a mesmerizing artwork that resembles the Norwegian fjords and the mechanical nature of the ship. M-City’s wonderfully stenciled ship will continue to sail along the North Sea as the coolest looking vessel around.

Etam Cru - First Day of School

Polish street art duo Etam Cru, consisting of street artists Sainer and Bezt, is famous for their beautiful and epic, large scale murals, rich in mysticism and folkloric symbolism of Eastern Europe, and very often spiced with a touch of humor, sarcasm and surrealism. For the last year’s edition of Nuart Street Art Festival, Etam Cru created an astonishing mural titled “First Day of School”, executed in their renowned super clean imagery. This fairy tale of a mural shows a sleeping student who has already eaten his apple, and whose bananas, sandwich and Kiepling’s “The Jungle Book” have fallen out of his backpack on top of which is a hatted mouse.